


A Very Tucker Christmas

by saltslimes



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Christmas, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 11:14:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2848844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltslimes/pseuds/saltslimes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, How Tucker Learned the Spirit of the Season.</p>
<p>It's Christmas (possibly) at the crash site, and Caboose insists they do secret Santa. But what to you get for a man who has nothing?</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Very Tucker Christmas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [babbyspanch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/babbyspanch/gifts).



> Merry Christmas Brodeo. This is for you.

If it was hard to keep track of holidays in Blood Gulch, it was ten times harder after the crash. At least in Blood Gulch they had calendars, even if they kept breaking and shorting out all the time. But now the time and date functions were all fucked up, and they didn’t really display anything relevant. And in Blood Gulch they’d get a vague and insincere Happy Holidays card that didn’t even have their names on it. Happy Holidays Blue Team. Like they couldn’t even be bothered to open the file and find out what their names were.

So when Caboose announced that it was Christmas, everyone just sort of went along with it, because heck, it could be Christmas. It was probably winter somewhere. It was the Reds idea to do secret Santa; a stupid idea, as Tucker was quick to point out. But did anybody listen? No. Of course not. So now he was stuck sitting out on the rocks, wracking his brains. What do you get for the man who has nothing, while you’re stuck in a box canyon full of nothing? He had one answer, but he was guessing it would get him in trouble.

Merry Christmas, I got you nothing, just didn’t sound like quite the way to ring in the holiday cheer. So he was debating between his other options: a rock, some bullets he found, and some more bullets he found with the other bullets. He groaned. He could do better than this. He had to do better than this.

He got up and walked down from the rocks to the base where Caboose was… well he hadn’t really been paying attention to what Caboose had been doing when he left, but what he was doing now looked explosive. The dangerous kind of explosive.

“What are you doing with those grenades, Caboose?” he asked warily.

“I am making a secret Santa gift.” Tucker decided not to ask. He wandered into their base and into his room, and flipped through his sparse belongings. A toothbrush he’d been keeping in an armour storage compartment for… too many years. A half-eaten bag of crackers. A block of protein, a pair of dirty underwear. Nothing you could give as a gift. And even if he had a… a novelty tin full of popcorn or a scarf or some other cliché gift, he couldn’t give that to Wash. Firstly, because he clearly wouldn’t want any of that junk, and secondly because… well, because that would be embarrassing. And for some reason he really wanted to impress Wash.

It was that obnoxious, unwavering confidence he had in Tucker, especially when he was whining. No matter how much he insisted that he couldn’t run more laps or do more pushups or he didn’t have any answers or ideas, Wash would insist that yes he did, and tell him that he was smart and a good solider and had “potential.” There was no heavier weight on your shoulders than potential. And these days, Tucker was catching himself believing him. The sword had to have picked him for a reason, right? Right? And it was nice to think, at least imagine, that all the fucked up shit he’d been through was for a reason. Because he was, at the very least, a pretty good solider.

How was he supposed to get Wash a gift better than that? Stumped for ideas, he decided to do what he always did back in Blood Gulch when nothing was going on. Or when things were going on. Or when he was just going about his normal business. Spy on the reds. Really, of all the time they spent there, a kind of ridiculous amount of it had been spent spying on them. And while it had yet to (at least to his memory) ever actually help them in any way, old habits were easy to fall back into. Of course, without Church and a sniper rifle, it would be hard to spy on them from the cliff side.

So he did the next best thing and just waltzed into their base. It wasn’t like anyone was guarding it. Things were about as normal as he expected. Simmons was desperately trying to make some kind of…paper mache monstrosity, and Grif was sitting on the sidelines watching and making unhelpful comments. They both jumped up when he entered, grabbing their guns. Tucker put his hands up.

“What are you doing here, blue?” Simmons asked.

“Yeah, get out of our base,” Grif added, gesturing with his rifle.

“We’re not even fighting each other you idiots,” Tucker said. Grif lowered his rifle.

“Oh yeah.”

“You’re still not allowed to just waltz in here,” Simmons grumbled.

“Oh yeah? Well I’d like to see you stop me. Besides, I just came to see what you guys were doing for secret Santa.”

“It’s supposed to be a secret, you moron,” Simmons said.

“He’s just grumpy because he’s afraid he won’t go down in kiss-ass history.”

“Who did you get?” Tucker asked.

“What part of secret didn’t you understand?” Simmons groaned.

“He got Sarge. Pretty much a dream come true,” Grif said.

“Shut up! Just… just go over there will you,” Simmons cried. He was flecking paper mache paste everywhere when he talked. Tucker and Grif retreated just to get him to stop screaming at them.

“Who did you get?” Tucker asked, when they were well out of Simmons’ earshot.

“Him,” Grif said, jerking a thumb back the direction they had just come from.

“Oh. Well at least that’s easy.”

“What? Easy? How?” Grif asked.

“Well you guys know everything about each other. You’re practically married.”

“What? No we aren’t,” Grif said hotly. There was an awkward silence, and then he asked, “Who did you get?”

“Wash.”

“Well I could say the same about you.” Tucker felt his face get hot inside his helmet.

“What? How so?”

“You certainly bicker like an old married couple.”

“Well so do you and Simmons.”

“And you spend all your time hanging out together.”

“We’re on the same team! He’s always insisting on training me!”

“And you make all the command decisions together.”

“That’s because everyone else in this stupid box canyon is an idiot!”

“I’m just saying, you might as well be married,” Grif said, clearly aware he had gotten under Tucker’s skin. Or his armor, at least.

“Well if you like the idea of shacking up with a teammate so much, why don’t you just marry Simmons?” Tucker practically yelled. Simmons looked up from his frantic work.

“Did someone say my name?” he asked.

“No,” Tucker and Grif said in unison. Tucker took this a his moment to leave. He headed back up to the rocks and sat looking down at their base, watching Caboose mess with his grenades, and Wash trying to fix the radio. Whoever he had for secret Santa, he apparently wasn’t worrying over it.

He tried to think what he would want, if Wash was the one getting him the present. His mind immediately went somewhere it shouldn’t have. He felt his codpiece get kind of tight. Urgh. That wasn’t helping at all. He needed to try a different angle. That or go lock himself in the bathroom.

What did Wash need? He needed transport out of there, the radio to work… Tucker to stop being an idiot. The reds to stop… whatever they were doing. None of those things were exactly achievable.

Tucker went back into the ship to loot for supplies and came out essentially empty-handed. The best he could come up with was a tin of armor polish and a bag of stale rations, but it was the best he could do. It wasn’t like the guy could expect better, right? And besides, everyone else was getting something way worse, from what he could tell.

The exchange didn’t go as horribly as it could have, all things considered.

Caboose’s gift actually didn’t kill Grif, Sarge wasn’t that big of a dick about Simmons’ horrible paper mache…thing. Grif got Simmons a bag of snack cakes which for some reason Simmons found surprisingly touching. And Sarge got Caboose a case of ammo, which sounded about par for the course.

Which meant that Wash and Tucker had gotten each other. However lame and disappointing Tucker’s gift was, Wash at least had the decency to not say anything. And even thank him. But then, he handed over his gift for Tucker. It wasn’t wrapped, he just pulled it out of one of the storage compartments on his armor.

“I found this in the wreckage, and I figured it belonged to you. So it’s not really a gift gift, but, you know,” he said, handing it over. It was a photograph, worn and creased around the edges.

It was taken back in Blood Gulch, when Church was just starting to warm up to Junior a little, before everything went to shit. Tucker and Church and Junior sitting in the base, just… being alive. And happy. They were kind of…awkwardly happy. Tucker had his helmet on and he had this goofy grin on his face that he wouldn’t recognize now even if he saw it in the mirror. He had forgotten he could smile like that.

He’d thought he lost the picture in the crash. He didn’t think he’d ever see it again. Shit. He was such an asshole. What did he get Wash? Nothing worth having. There was a big confusion when Sarge almost chucked a grenade at Grif for something, and Tucker slipped away, back up towards the rocks. He was only up there for a few minutes when he saw Wash emerge from the base, scan the area and spot him, and then head over with purpose.

Tucker didn’t say anything when he got up there. Wash was the first to speak.

“If my gift was crappy…” he started. Tucker stopped him right there.

“It’s fucking awesome dude. I just…”

“It must be really hard,” Wash said. There was no need to be specific as to what. They both knew exactly what he meant. Tucker pried off his helmet. Wash had taken his off down at the party and he felt it was kind of unfair for them to have a conversation, even one that wasn’t an argument, where only one of them could see the other’s facial expressions.

“It is. It’s really fucking hard,” Tucker said. He turned his helmet over in his hands. New paint job and it was already starting to look like his one from way back when, chipped and scratched all over. Wash sat down beside him. “I’m sorry I got you such a shitty gift. I didn’t know what you wanted.”

“I want to get out of here.”

“That I could get, asshole.”

“Oh. Well, probably it’s not something you’d want to give me,” Wash said. His toothbrush? He was willing to bargin.

“What do you mean, dude?”

“I mean you probably… you wouldn’t want to give it… to me specifically…” Wash trailed off.

“Just tell me what it is and I’ll tell you if I’d give it to you.” Tucker put his helmet down on the rocks.

“Um. Mistletoe?” Wash blurted out, like it was a question. Tucker frowned. Mistletoe? Wash turned beet red. Tucker’s confusion turned to realization.

“You mean you—”

“It was stupid, I’m gonna—just forget I ever said that, okay? I have… heat stroke or something,” Wash said, getting up to leave. Tucker grabbed the chest plate of his armor and pulled him back so fast they knocked together, their faces banging into each other, their mouths touching for a second. Wash looked at him wide-eyed.

“Tanks aren’t like, only for picking up chicks,” Tucker said. And then he kissed him. And Wash kissed back. And his mouth had sand in it, and his little bit of stubble was rough on Tucker’s face, and it was totally, stupidly perfect. Like obnoxiously awesome. He felt like he’d just been shot up with adrenaline. When they pulled apart Wash said,

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means we don’t need any mistletoe, okay?” Tucker said. Wash grinned. They left it at that.

Later, when they met up with the resistance, they would find out it was actually June, so the whole thing was totally pointless. Well, as Wash would later argue, not totally pointless.


End file.
